A Long Island woman is suing the Harlem psychiatric ward that sedated her, locked her up, and misdiagnosed her as delusional last fall after she told doctors U.S. President Barack Obama follows her on Twitter. “I told (the doctor) Obama follows me on Twitter to show her the type of person I am,” Kam Brock told the New York Daily News. “I’m a good person, a positive person. Obama follows positive people!”

Editorial

Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives have finally faced up to the fiscal house of cards they have constructed on the quicksand of royalty revenues over the last two decades. Taxes will rise with the explicit goal of saving a significant chunk of fossil-fuel revenues we have been spending up to now like there was no tomorrow.

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When the Conservative government committed last year to sending Canadian troops to combat ISIL in Iraq, there was a clear strategy and goal in mind. Our air and special forces were to “significantly degrade” the death cult’s capabilities, “specifically its ability to either engage in military movements of scale or to operate bases in the open,” which would, it was hoped, allow ground forces — largely Iraqi troops and Kurdish peshmerga fighters — to recapture large swaths of the country controlled by militants.

When he took office as RCMP commissioner in late 2011, Bob Paulson acknowledged the Mounties had too many secrets. Canada’s national police force had been shaken by stories of pervasive sexual harassment. The RCMP had taken public hits for high profile blunders and subsequent coverups. Aftershocks from the October 2007 Taser-related death of Robert Dziekanski are felt to this day, with another ex-Mountie convicted of perjury just last week.

The government led by Premier Jim Prentice is about to do two things that cost Albertans money: table a budget and call an election. Given the current, unfortunate opposition wasteland, the voters of this province aren’t likely to get their money’s worth from a trip to the polls that will be long over before the first stump speech is delivered.

Someday, it will be a matter of gobsmacking astonishment that people were still allowed to own guns in the early 21st century. Children will react with the same wide-eyed wonder that greets the great reveal about procreation. Older people will think they are being taken for fools, and rush to Google the matter on their iGlasses.

Like phone signals and radio waves, we’re bombarded by conspiracy theories these days. So it’s no surprise an Alberta parents group is considering lobbying for new restrictions on wireless networks in schools.

A new study has confirmed what many seniors have clucked about for decades: We’re spoiling our children with too much praise. Researchers in the U.S. and Netherlands recently studied two theories about narcissism — is it a lack of parental affection which drives children to create their inflated sense of superiority or parents’ incessant admiration of their kids’ abundant good looks and talent?

When it comes to his grasp on the Northland School Division’s attendance woes, Education Minister Gordon Dirks deserves a failing grade. This week he described as “troubling” a blistering report from Auditor General Merwan Saher on the intractable issue of keeping kids in school in that far-flung rural school division.

When former employment minister Jason Kenney introduced tweaks to Canada’s temporary foreign worker program last summer, Albertans complained about disastrous implications. A McDonald’s franchise owner warned of “irreparable damage” to Alberta’s economy, restaurant hours reduced or shuttered from a lack of workers. At their annual meeting, the Alberta Urban Municipalities Association warned about the impact of the “overcorrection” to Alberta’s 271 cities, towns and hamlets, where TFWs have been a vital transfusion for flagging businesses. And freshly minted Premier Jim Prentice spoke of problems facing our packing plants, promising to promptly take it up with his old boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

What happens when those we trust most with human life are suddenly in charge of death? Earlier this month, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld a decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, ruling against a family who wanted their mother’s care home to stop spoon-feeding her.

The Journal editorial board is a decidedly non-trendy bunch. This became even more painfully evident when a new tourist fad surfaced last month — taking nude selfies in front of sacred sites. Now, one might ask — does the board approve of doffing one’s duds for photos in front of any tourist sites?

Let’s not succumb to the language Jim Prentice’s government is using to mask the true intent and spirit of its new approach to controlling public-sector labour costs. It will not be “bargaining,” the parties will not “work together,” and they certainly won’t be equals coming to an arrangement of mutual benefit in any sense that private-sector negotiators would recognize.

There’s no excuse for drinking and driving. But that shouldn’t give us licence to bypass reasonable doubt. Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Thomas Wakeling spent months contemplating Alberta’s new impaired driving penalties before tossing a challenge that the law unfairly penalizes innocent defendants. His written decision, released last Friday, was parodied by the head of the Criminal Trial Lawyers’ Association as “Well, that’s too bad.”

In May 2003, the first reported case of mad cow disease in an Alberta-born animal set in motion events that devastated Canada’s beef industry. Canadian exports were banned almost immediately in 40 countries, including the U.S. The American response was most crippling, given that 70 per cent of Canada’s exported beef lands in the U.S.